We should demonise rape
On the 'progressive' dismantling of feminist analyses of sexual violence
“There definitely is a demonisation of rape, in the sense of it is a spectrum.” This disturbing statement was made by Q Manivannan, an MSP for the Scottish Green Party, in an interview a year ago. Yesterday it was shared on X, promoting much outrage. Surely, of all things, rape should be demonised?
Manivannan claims to have been misrepresented (though not misquoted). Looking at the full discussion, I would agree that the extract shared on X doesn’t capture everything, but not that it excuses him all that much. Part of what Manivannan is saying is uncontroversial, if quite trite (sexual violence takes place in different contexts and the rapist is usually known to the victim as opposed to some masked man jumping out of the bushes). It’s not as though anyone has made this observation before, other than literally every feminist for the past fifty years. However, by going on to say not just that the rapist isn’t always “some big burly man” but that “any individual is capable of rape” (to much agreement from his female interlocutor), Manivannan is directly opposing a feminist analysis of sexual violence, one in which sex matters. He is suggesting that women could just as easily be rapists as men, therefore there’s no need to view the rape of women, children or men within the context of a gender hierarchy. He is treating “people of either sex can commit rape” as the same challenge to stereotype as “husbands and boyfriends commit rape as well as big, burly strangers”. It’s the kind of thing where, if you’re new to feminism, or if you just don’t want to think about it too hard, you might be taken in. It’s akin to “boys can wear dresses” sounding the same as “boys can have vaginas”. It feels like the same logical manoeuvre is being made in both cases, when only one statement is actually true.
Obviously Manivannan is obliged to make this this move. He has to play these kind of tricks because he’s committed to denying the political salience of biological sex in all situations. What worries me is that it is part of a bigger dismantling of the feminist understandings of rape, trauma and power, one that has been done in the name of ‘progress’.
The phrase “demonisation of rape” instantly made me think of “weaponisation of rape”. The idea of rape being “weaponised” – not just actual experiences of rape being “misused”, but the victim being in some way responsible – has gained respectability in recent years. Men who have no concern for female bodies and boundaries – who may be rapists themselves – have long used “protecting ‘their’ women” from rape to justify hatred of men from other groups. This is not a new or particularly complex insight (though it hasn’t stopped many a self-styled ‘inclusive’ feminist from presenting it as the product of years of deep intersectional thought). It shouldn’t be difficult to treat the ‘concern for women’ of angry male mobs with scepticism while recognising that a genuine complaint of rape – even a ‘politically inconvenient’ one which can be exploited by said mobs – should be taken seriously. The complainant is owed compassion, regardless of whether the perpetrator belongs to a group that you don’t wish to be ‘made to look bad’. She should not be considered complicit in the construction of a harmful narrative or expected to keep silent for an apparent greater good. Nor should she be told that whether a perpetrator deserves punishment depends on how privileged or marginalised he is perceived to be in relation to her (her pain is not lessened or increased as a consequence).
Yet there is a supposedly ‘progressive’ politics that expects all of these things of the rape victim. In Me, Not You, academic Alison Phipps writes that “acts, threats and allegations of sexual violence are all tools of oppression”. She claims that “terror” can be generated when “impoverished white men [are] accused of raping bourgeois white women”. To be clear, she is not referring to false allegations, but real ones too:
“… being a victim and being a perpetrator are not mutually exclusive. Bourgeois white women can be victims of sexual violence, but we are also perpetrators of race and class supremacy.”
This is not exactly untrue, providing one is able to maintain the distinction being a rape victim and retaining racial and/or class-based privileges, even in relation to the person who assaulted you. Phipps doesn’t do this, blending the two things together to make the “bourgeois white woman” even more of a villain now she has “wounds” to exploit. In a blog post she compares the “punitive tendencies of the mainstream [feminist] movement against sexual violence”, asking for “more police, more convictions and longer sentences”, to “calling the manager”. Rape victims – especially “bourgeois white women” – are such Karens. Meanwhile, the sex-based privilege of the hypothetically “impoverished” perpetrator does not get a mention.
A feminist analysis of sexual violence is intolerable to anyone who believes that liberation means sex denialism and no one ever setting boundaries when it comes to male sexual entitlement. I think there have been three main tactics deployed by those trying to position themselves as ‘feminist’ and ‘progressive’ while essentially embracing the same “victims should STFU and stop ruining men’s lives” views promoted by the average MRA:
1. Focussing on ‘privileged’ victims and suggesting they ‘weaponise’ their assaults to consolidate their own privilege (as in the Phipps example).
2. Acknowledging the trauma of rape victims, but suggesting it ‘damages’ them in such a way as to make them bigoted towards subsets of men, victimising these men by casting them as potential rapists. An example would be Judith Butler in Who’s Afraid of Gender?:
“Sexual violence is real. The traumatic aftermath is also real, but living in the repetitive temporality of trauma does not always give us an adequate account of social reality. In fact, the reality of the trauma we suffer makes it difficult to distinguish between what we most fear and what is actually happening, what happened in the past and what is happening now. It takes some careful work for those distinctions to emerge in a stable form for clear judgement. The obliteration of those distinctions is part of trauma’s damage.”
This is a long-winded way of saying that rape victims who want single-sex spaces are deluded about risk and in need of fixing. To give him credit, Mridul Wadhwa put it more snappily with “reframe your trauma”. Butler goes on to claim that feminists are “inflicting a form of psychic violence on [male] trans people” when they do not differentiate between them and other males. The ‘damaged’ victim becomes perpetrator.
3. Making an ‘anti-carceral’ case (as Manivannan does) and in doing so calling on – but never quite directly repeating – the age-old stereotype that victim who wishes to see her rapist punished is vengeful and vindictive. In The Right To Sex, Amia Srinivasan claims that “a feminist politics which sees the punishment of bad men as its primary purpose will never be a feminism that liberates all women”, as if such a feminism actually exists. Female rape victims feel compelled to showcase their progressive politics by not reporting their rapes (I do not see ‘progressive’ men doing the same thing, should they have been beaten up, robbed or indeed raped, presumably because in their case, they’re against punishment in principle but can say things aren’t yet in place for an anti-carceral utopia).*
